BackgroundThe experiences of patients with COVID-19 and their families manifested the most devastating effects of family separation since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic and, with it, a call for solutions to patient isolation and its effect on family mental health.
ObjectiveThis study examined the recent experiences of families of critical care (intensive care unit; ICU) patients related to anxiety and depression (AD), satisfaction with clinician-family communication, and counseling from mental health and social services. This study explored correlations between these factors and family interest in mobile health (mHealth) designed to improve information flow and communication from patient bedside to remote families.
MethodsUsing a 36-question quantitative survey, we collected 97 responses over 6 months. We selected participants by using a convenience sampling strategy. To analyze data, we applied descriptive and inferential statistics. Participants represented a spectrum of ages, relationships to patients, and races (n=78, 80% White; n=17, 18% Black; n=2, 2% other races). Approximately 17% (n=16) of the patients were admitted for cancer, 13% (n=13) were admitted for COVID-19, and 21% (n=20) were admitted for other conditions.
ResultsThe mean score for remote families’ satisfaction with patient health updates from the bedside and mental health services was 2.94 (SD 1.31), whereas that for phone communication was lower on average. The mean scores of family AD levels were elevated, and levels were higher among family members during the ICU stay than after discharge. These findings confirmed evidence of a negative correlation between transportation difficulties and satisfaction with the frequency of information provided (r=−0.284; P=.005), suggesting that, with the increase in transportation challenges, families become less satisfied with the frequency of patient health information. Family members expressed strong interest in using mHealth information and communication services (mean 8.34, SD 1.98) and having easy access to social workers to manage AD (mean 8.29, SD 2.03). Families experiencing higher levels of anxiety during patients’ ICU stays had significantly greater interest in the use of an mHealth app that would provide direct access to social workers (r=0.326; P<.001), in using an mHealth videoconferencing app (r=0.319; P=.002), and in overall mHealth app use (r=0.322; P<.001).
ConclusionsFamily members experienced high levels of AD during patient ICU admission, as well as after discharge even though their mental health challenges were reduced. Families were highly dissatisfied with the frequency of health updates, with lower satisfaction reported among those who faced difficulties arranging transportation or lived further from the hospital. Modest but statistically significant correlations were observed between family members’ reported mental health status during ICU stays and an interest in an mHealth app that could provide access to real-time bedside information, facilitate communication with bedside nurses, and support connections with social workers.
The rapid digitalization in recent years has opened up many technological possibilities, gradually transforming various sectors and society as a whole. This digital shift has enabled advancements in a number of fields, leading to improved resource efficiency, systems and processes. The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a system of interconnected devices that share information that exchange information with one another via the internet. IoT devices are now everywhere, found in applications ranging from unmanned aerial vehicles to smart home environments, from the Industrial Internet of Things to the Internet of Medical Things. The core concept of IoT revolves around establishing a seamless and intelligent communication ecosystem, facilitating interactions between devices over the internet. This is anticipated to create new opportunities for enhancing services in various societal sectors, such as transportation, farming and smart cities. However, IoT-based networks face limitations and challenges that hinder the realization of their full potential. This paper outlines these challenges and proposes solutions, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and innovation. The paper also anticipates future trends in IoT, particularly the integration of 5G connectivity, cloud computing and AI, and identifies areas for future research to address current challenges and explore new applications.
Social Sciences, Management. Industrial management
Samantha Girasulo, Caro Maltz, Maggie Weichert
et al.
Objective: To assess the specific barriers and facilitators for pregnant individuals who have an opioid use disorder (OUD) receiving perinatal care. Methods: We conducted key informant interviews with patients who received care from obstetric clinicians who had been trained to provide medication for opioid use disorder (n = 16). We asked patients about the care they received for their OUD, the quality of communication with their perinatal care team, and any recommendations for improving OUD care. Two staff independently coded transcripts, and we used content analysis to identify themes. Results: Our analysis resulted in three main facilitators that support participants receiving care from their obstetric clinician: (1) positive relationship with supportive and nonjudgmental clinician; (2) access to medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD); and (3) access to therapeutic and peer supports. Patients noted that nonjudgmental clinicians provided a care environment where they felt safe, did not experience stigma, and felt they could be active participants in their care. Patients also expressed that access to MOUD and clinical and supportive services were beneficial components of perinatal care. The main barriers identified included lack of access to transportation, long wait times for treatment programs, and difficulty accessing MOUD. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that increased obstetric provider education about OUDs and providing trauma-informed care for pregnant individuals who have an OUD may help reduce barriers to accessing care and increase satisfaction with care for this population. Furthermore, the present study suggests obstetricians provide in-house access to MOUD, if possible, or assist patients with referrals to care, as these may reduce the structural barriers patients face.
Gynecology and obstetrics, Public aspects of medicine
Akram Rostamkhani, Milad Alizadeh Galdiani, Mohammadreza Rezazadeh
et al.
The decision-making process of customers choosing a product or service is complex and dependent on many factors. These factors do not remain unchanged, and customers may change their behavior over time. This is important in markets with alternative products or services, and manufacturers and service providers should effectively monitor customers’ behavior and preferences so that they could be successful in the market. In the freight transportation industry, customers can choose between freight transportation modes. This study sought to identify factors influencing customers’ choices of transportation modes and contribute to transportation managers. Influential factors, e.g., time, safety, and distance, were extracted from the literature. The insignificant factors were excluded through expert views based on the Delphi method, prioritizing the remaining factors through the decision-making and trial evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL)-based analytic network process (DANP) and constructing the DEMATEL matrix of the criteria. It was found that cost, time, speed, safety, and health are the most important determinants of freight customers’ choices of land transportation modes.
The control problem of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) suspended transportation systems (STSs) has become a popular topic in the field of both theoretical investigation and engineering applications. With the increasing complexities of the mission environment, it is difficult to accomplish a transportation task with a single UAV, and using multiple UAVs to collaboratively suspend and transport loads has become increasingly significant. Motivated by this, this work presents an event-triggered formation optimization-based control scheme for a multi-quadrotor STS, which can reduce the power consumption of the UAV formation by dynamically adjusting the UAV formation while achieving load trajectory tracking. In the developed scheme, the STS is decoupled into the suspended load and the multiple UAV subsystems based on the principle of timescale separation. It allows to design independently the virtual force command of the load and the actual control law, which are designed by using the sliding mode-like control method. Afterward, the formation optimization algorithm is presented. The obtained virtual force command of the suspended load would provide the receding horizon formation for the UAVs to minimize the sum of cable forces and the power consumption, where the constraints of cable tension, cable break, and collision avoidance are considered. Furthermore, the event-triggering mechanism is appointed for the formation optimization algorithm, and it reduces the solving frequency of the optimization algorithm and the computational burden of the system. Both the stability of the closed-loop system and the boundedness of the number of event triggers in finite time are confirmed by using the Lyapunov function method. Numerical simulations verify that the developed method can effectively reduce the energy consumption of multiple UAVs and reliably accomplish the trajectory tracking of the suspended load. Therefore, this work offers certain theoretical significance and practical application value for promoting the development of multiple UAV STSs. In addition, this work on the formation control of the STS expands the application scope of UAV suspension and enhances its transportation efficiency. In terms of cooperation suspension, how to generate and adjust the UAV formation to pass through narrow space still maintains profound research significance. Future work may consider the attitude loop of the suspended load, which plays an irreplaceable role in performing transportation tasks. Meanwhile, using a distributed communication protocol rather than a centralized one could distribute computational burdens to each UAV, which would better enhance engineering practicability.
Hung Nguyen, Thanh Phuong Nguyen, Ha Quang Thinh Ngo
Abstract In Industry 4.0, the innovative concept of a smart warehouse is defined as a progressive development in logistics and operations management. Numerous advanced techniques are recommended for integration, including wearable devices, communication, loading/unloading, optimization, robotics, and automated transportation, among others. Currently, the growing demand for swift cargo distribution, cost‐effective labour utilization, and enhanced productivity stands as an urgent topic for both enterprises and scholars. This paper presents an EtherCAT‐based model of automated guided vehicle (AGV)‐manipulation introduced within the Unity platform for smart warehouse management. The working environment selected for this model is a cross‐docking warehouse with a chessboard layout. Initially, theoretical computations pertaining to mechanical design are established to provide accurate parameters. Subsequently, the structure of the TwinCAT Human–Machine Interface Server and the configuration within the Unity environment are outlined. Following that, the software architecture, encompassing data exchange and a set of motion commands, is meticulously explained. To validate the proposed approach, several laboratory tests are conducted under identical conditions. This research offers several contributions: firstly, it introduces the innovative use of real‐time technology to represent AGV systems; secondly, it elucidates the potential connection between virtual reality and the physical model; and thirdly, it employs fluid motion techniques to illustrate and visualize driving performance. These findings hold significant promise not only for the advancement of smart warehouse management but also for the broader landscape of digital trade.
Control engineering systems. Automatic machinery (General)
Mondikathi Chiranjeevi, V Sateeshkrishna Dhuli, Murali Krishna Enduri
et al.
The detection and ranking of influential nodes in complex networks are crucial for various practical applications such as identifying potential drug targets in protein-to-protein interaction networks, critical devices in communication networks, key people in social networks, and transportation hubs in logistics networks. The knowledge of influential spreaders in complex networks is extremely useful for controlling the spread of information. Centrality measures are known for effectively quantifying the influential nodes information in large-scale complex networks. Researchers have proposed different centrality measures in the literature, including Degree, Betweenness, Closeness, and Clustering coefficient centralities. However, these measures have certain limitations when implemented over large-scale complex networks. Most of these measures can be classified as global and local structural approaches. The global structure based algorithms are too complex to evaluate key nodes, particularly in large-scale networks, whereas the local measures overlook the essential global network information. To address these challenges, an extended clustering coefficient local global centrality (ECLGC) is proposed, which combines the local and global structural information to measure the node’s influence in large-scale networks. The effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed measure are compared with existing centrality measures on real-world network datasets. Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model is utilized to evaluate the performance of the ECLGC to capture the high-information dissemination compared to conventional measures. Further, we demonstrate that the proposed measure outperforms the conventional measures in terms of spreading efficiency.
Pedestrian-based mobile sensing enables a large number of urban-centric use cases in the areas of intelligent mobility, smart city, and crowd management. With increasing standardization in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to increase localized environmental awareness, i.e. cooperative perception (CP), a technological basis is already heavily discussed. Work in this area is usually directed toward road safety use cases. However, the same technologies could also be applied to pedestrian-centric applications in urban areas. Use cases like spatiotemporal density maps of pedestrians for public transportation optimization or urban route planning are such examples. This paper introduces an opportunistic decentralized mobile crowd sensing (MCS) approach where arbitrary measurement quantities are collected, aggregated, and disseminated in decentralized pedestrian measurement maps (DPMM). The sensing, dissemination, and aggregation are driven by mobile devices, without the need for centralized aggregation and dissemination infrastructure. By utilizing cellular sidelink communication (i.e. via the PC5 interface in 5G/6G systems) and node-local aggregation, the perception of the environment can be directly shared with neighboring nodes. The described DPMM approach is evaluated using CrowNet, an open-source simulation framework based on OMNeT++/INET by employing several detailed simulation studies: first, using a synthetic measurement quantity with a linear change rate behavior and second, a real use case concerning decentralized pedestrian density measurements. The results indicate that DPMM can provide spatiotemporal maps of the local area with a high level of detail and low delay – close to the optimum achievable in a specific mobility situation – while only requiring a moderate amount of cellular bandwidth.
With the advancement of wireless communication technology, the intelligent transportation system (ITS) has attracted the attention of vehicle companies and academic researchers. Recently, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) as a leading genuine technology have received serious attention as a kind of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to ensure the safety of vehicles, drivers, and passengers. However, these networks face many challenges due to the mobility of vehicle nodes, wireless communication, and frequent topology changes. One of the crucial issues of these networks is a cluster-based routing scheme with the ability to provide quality of service (QoS) parameters. A clustering scheme is an appropriate method for increasing the scalability of VANETs. In a cluster-based routing scheme, the cluster head (CH) is responsible for receiving data from its member nodes, and aggregating and transferring data to the next CH node. On the other hand, providing a suitable clustering method is NP-hard problems and meta-heuristic algorithms are suitable for solving these problems. A scalable and reliable routing scheme is necessary and essential in VANETs. In this paper, a routing method based on the clustering technique is presented considering the moth-flame optimization (MFO) algorithm for clustering and the Firefly optimization algorithm (FoA) with a suitable fitness function for routing between CHs. The simulation of the proposed method with MATLAB software shows that the proposed RVMF method improves the parameters of packet delivery rate (PDR), latency, and throughput.
SummaryOver the past two decades, vehicular collisions have been a significant concern for governments, researchers, and automobile manufacturers. However, collisions are unexpected and occur regularly on roads, resulting in deaths, infrastructure destruction, and health injuries. As a result, it is essential to avoid, prevent, and detect traffic collisions at the highest degree possible for minimizing human loss. In this article, the trend of road traffic accidents in India has been analyzed graphically. Towards the end, a VANET‐based traffic safety management approach (VANET‐TSMA) has been proposed to reduce road accidents in India. This approach uses message distribution, traffic management, and congestion control efficiently for reducing the overall rate of road accidents. This method is based on multiple information and communication technology (ICT)‐based safety mechanisms which include collision avoidance, collision detection, and traffic congestion avoidance for the protection of future connected automobiles on roads.
Introduction: Amazing technological advances in transportation, health, communication and education continue to facilitate our lives from past to present. Considering the developmental and professional characteristics of students with special needs; It is thought that educational technologies have a very important place in enriching the learning and teaching processes in terms of gaining competence.Method: Previous studies on special education and educational technologies indexed in the Education Research Index (ERIC) database between 1960-2019 were reviewed with scientometric methods, and in this context, 22049 studies with "Special Education", "Educational Technology" labels are obtained. This study, carried out by using content analysis, is a descriptive/depictive study in terms of purpose.Findings: One of the most important findings of this study is that the word "handicapped" was used in the abstract parts of articles in 1980s and early 1990s. However, it was later replaced with "disability". Another significant finding of the study is that computers are often used as a technology tool in special education. Accordingly, it can be said that studies from past to present have been focusing on school and there is a consistency in the articles on educational programs. It is thought that the computer software used in obtaining this result has an effect considering the results on trends in real life skills related to children and teachers who also play an important role in the studyDiscussion: Based on the findings, it is recommended to future researchers to renew curriculum programs in this direction and arrange them by making use of technological development to include the target audience which is not only families but also teacher candidates.
As an important part of smart city, intelligent transportation is an critical breakthrough to solve urban traffic congestion, build an integrated transportation system, realize the intelligence of traffic infrastructure and promote sustainable development of traffic. In order to investigate the construction of intelligent transportation in cities, 20 initial affecting variables were determined in this study based on literature analysis. A questionnaire collected from professionals in intelligent transportation was conducted, and a total of 188 valid responses were received. Then the potential grouping was revealed through exploratory factor analysis. Finally, a causal model containing seven concepts was established using the practical experience and knowledge of the experts. A root cause analysis method based on fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) was also proposed to simulate intelligent transportation construction (ITC). The results indicate:(1) The 20 variables can be divided into six dimensions: policy support (PS), traffic sector control (TSC), technical support (TS), communication foundation (CF), residents’ recognition (RR), and talent quality (TQ); and (2) In the FCM model, all six concept nodes (PS, TSC, TS, CF, RR, and TQ) have a significant positive correlation with the target concept node ITC. The rank of the six dimensions according to correlation strength is TS, CF, PS, TSC, RR, and TQ. The findings of this paper can help academics and practitioners understand the deep-seated determinants of urban intelligent transportation construction more comprehensively, and provide valuable suggestions for policy makers. And thus, the efficiency of intelligent transportation construction can be improved.
Stephen E Njolomole, Ridhaa Fatima Sachidanandan, George Mandere
et al.
<h4>Background</h4>Postpartum haemorrhage (PPH) is the leading cause of maternal mortality in Malawi. Despite the presence of a centralized institution supplying blood and blood products for hospitals across the country, a lack of timely blood transfusion has been identified as a critical barrier to successful PPH management. This study aims to understand the factors that affect the blood delivery pipeline and adequate access to blood products for postpartum haemorrhage patients.<h4>Methods</h4>Qualitative data were collected through in-depth interviews with key stakeholders across the blood delivery pipeline. Interviews were conducted from July 2020 to January 2021 at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital and Mulanje District Hospital, a referral and district hospital respectively, as well as the Malawi Blood Transfusion Service. Line by line, open coding was used to perform a thematic analysis of the data using Nvivo and Atlas.ti software.<h4>Results</h4>Five key themes were identified: 1) Lack of blood availability due to an inadequate donor pool, 2) Transportation of blood products and PPH patients is impeded by distance to target sites and competing interests for blood delivery vehicles, 3) The Malawi Blood Transfusion Service has difficulty meeting demand for blood products due to inadequate funding and difficulty retaining blood donors, 4) Current PPH management protocols and practices lead to delays due to inconsistent guidelines on delivery and analysis of patient samples, and 5) Communication between health cadres is inconsistent and affected by a lack of adequate resources.<h4>Conclusions</h4>Barriers to timely blood transfusion for PPH patients exist across the blood delivery pipeline. While an investment of infrastructure would alleviate many obstacles, several solutions identified in this study can be implemented without additional resources, such as establishing joint department meetings to improve communication between health cadres. Ultimately, given a resource limited setting, it may be worth considering de-centralizing the blood supply.
Hareer Fatima Ahmed, Amin Hosseinian-Far, Rasoul Khandan
et al.
<i>Background</i>: Knowledge transfer has been an important aspect in supply chain systems; however, there are many factors that affect the impact of transfer effectiveness. In previous studies, less attention has been given to the process of knowledge transfer and therefore, this paper highlights the significance of the process of knowledge transfer in supply chain processes. Enhanced supply chain networks have better performance when knowledge sharing is present, and it is important to identify and eliminate any supply chain complexity to improve the supply chain processes. <i>Methods</i>: A systematic review on the literature has been conducted to critically identify and evaluate the factors of supply chain complexity which impact knowledge transfer. <i>Findings</i>: The findings highlight the key benefits of effective knowledge transfer in supply chain systems by identifying risks associated with supply chain networks. <i>Conclusion</i>: The balanced power of facilitating knowledge transfer in supply chain processes helps in supply chain partnerships and reduces the supply chain complexity. This paper has both theoretical and practical contributions as it adds to the literature by identifying the factors of supply chain complexity drivers which are impacting the knowledge transfer.
Transportation and communication, Management. Industrial management